we burn in fire, in blood, (in dreams)
by Shadows of a Dream
Summary: It is the 21st century, and Natasha Romanoff is a thousand different people, and none of them are herself./It is the 21st century, and Peggy Carter is a collage of dreams and wars, hopes and loves, tangled together in a dance that never stops.../"You love him." Peggy stretches out a frail, pale, wrinkled hand... "I know. I did."/Peggy & Natasha meet, and then meet again. One-shot.


**we burn in fire, in blood, (in dreams)**

It is the 1940s, and Natalia Romanova is a weapon and nothing more.

It's been approximately thirty-seven hours since her handlers unleashed that hell inside her blood, that American sickness they called a serum, and she _burned,_ she melted, she was welded into something new, something bright and savage. A loaded rifle, hidden behind gently parted lips. A daydream dressed to kill.

The blond they called "Dottie" returned to the Red Room approximately eleven minutes ago for debriefing. She returned with teeth bared, bones all but broken, hands trembling with the impulse to tear the world apart at the seams. In the Red Room, there is no need for the naïve façade, the sparkling-eyes, red-lips, lovely-beautiful-fool mask they wear on to the streets. And so Dottie returned not in elegance, but in _rage._

"She _knows_ ," Dottie said to her handler. Natalia listened from the rafters above, crouched silently in the shadows. "The English woman, this Peggy Carter… she knows who we are, what we do. She has to be eliminated."

"That was precisely your task," said the handler, in a voice like ice.

"If I'd been properly equipped –"

"Your body is your weapon. Your beauty is your armor and your sword."

Dottie hissed. "The American serum. You promised us that when our training was complete, when we were worthy…"

"Are you worthy?"

"I've signed my life away to you in blood. What more do you want? What else can I _be_?"

"And what are you?"

"Whatever you want me to be."

The handler swore under his breath. "Somewhere on the other side of the ocean, the English woman is still alive, still breathing, and likely sticking pins into a map as she plans exactly how to approach our once-clandestine home. You, my darling, are a _failure._ "

Natalia could not see Dottie in the room below, but she _felt_ the breath rush out of Dottie's lungs, heard the silence that was like everything breaking.

"If I had the serum –"

"The scientists who designed that serum are dead, shot down by the very woman you failed to eliminate. The last remaining sample has already been used."

An intake of breath; knuckles cracking. "On whom?"

"Natalia Alianovna Romanova."

At the sound of her own name, it became too much. Natalia crept down from the rafters like a spider, swept back to her shared bedchamber, and laid down on her cot, pretending to have been at rest. Even with her eyes closed, her mind was still whirring. What would become of Dottie, branded a failure of the Red Room program? What would become of herself, its living legacy?

When he returned from his current mission in Sokovia, what would James think of this fire inside her veins, this power that had left her shuddering and screaming in the dead of night, arching away from phantom pain that's seared into her bones?

Then Natalia's thoughts fractured, because there was a shadow above her cot, deepening even the darkness on the inside of her eyelids. She looked, and froze.

Dottie smiled, wicked, a curved silver life clenched in her trembling fist. "It seems you've taken something of mine," she said, all enthusiasm, her lip curled back in a wildcat's snarl. "I'll take it back, if you please."

Natalia barely had time to roll aside, her spine hitting the floor with an awful _crack,_ before Dottie's knife slashed the empty space where her throat had been. "Dottie," she gasped, and again, " _Dottie,_ " but the blond moved to drive the knife between her ribs, and adrenaline took over.

Natalia tackled her assailant, knees pressing on her chest, hands seizing her wrists. The world was glistening red at the edges, shimmering, too bright too loud too _inside every pore of her,_ and in this moment, Natalia loathed the serum. She loathed knowing that it was redirected biology – not destiny – that allowed her to pin this taller, stronger girl with lean arms and a predator's teeth to the floor.

Dottie's eyes were flat, pupils wide. Unreadable. "Get off me."

"Dottie," Natalia breathed, and the breath shook her ribcage, rattled her lungs. "Dottie, please." The blond sagged beneath her, and Natalia straightened a bit, drawing her knees back, loosening her claw-grip on the other girl's wrists. "We were like sisters."

"Such a shame," Dottie said, and thrust out with the silver blade, "that they made you into a weapon."

It has been approximately sixteen minutes since Dottie returned to the Red Room. Now Natalia lies huddled in the nearby woods, her back pressed against the rough bark of a tree, her side spilling red, red, _red_ into the clean snow. She's a failed experiment. She's a rifle in a madman's hands. She's less than she ever was, when the serum was supposed to make her so much more.

She's bleeding out, alone in the wilderness, one hand pressed in vain to the damage, teeth gritted against a scream that would never stop.

 _James would be proud of me,_ she thinks, not knowing why, before darkness creeps across her eyes.

 **~x~X~x~**

Peggy Carter wasn't on the other side of the world, marking a map to plan an invasion. Peggy was leading the Howling Commandos headlong into Russia's abandoned places, blinking hard against the howling winds and snow.

The primary Red Room training facility isn't far from here. She can glimpse the building through Dugan's binoculars, and it's terrifying how normal, how inexplicably _meaningless,_ the facility actually appears. They'll be upon it in minutes.

But Peggy freezes in her tracks, her heart in her throat, because there's a teenage girl in the snow, eyes closed, skin pale and all but frosted over – and she's bleeding.

Because she is a soldier, Peggy doesn't flinch, choke on a sob, or lean on the nearest male shoulder for support. Because she is a soldier, she kneels beside the girl and demands immediate medical attention.

Because she is Peggy Carter, she pauses the mission where they stand, she kneels beside the bleeding girl, and she prays, by God, she _prays_ because this is all but a _child_ with years to live and a world to claim and people she hasn't even met that she will feel she was born to love, and this child cannot – will not – die today.

"What about the mission?" asks the nearest Howling Commando.

"The mission is to stop more lives from being lost," Peggy says, unfaltering, "and that starts by stopping the bleeding. So you can help me, soldier, or you can go on without me, but I think you know which is best."

The Commandos all stay.

 **~x~X~x~**

Natalia fades in and out, like a flickering candle flame. Sometimes she's aware of the bandages on her side, the gentle palm against her forehead, the whispered words of assurance that stick to her like snowflakes; sometimes there's only dark and dark and _pain._

A strange woman talks to her for hours, even though she can't find the will to answer. In a very English accent, the woman tells a very Russian legend, one Natalia dimly remembers being told as a child in the Red Room, during one of their required lessons. The story is of a firebird, whose wings flashed orange and scarlet and gold. Her handlers once said that the bird burned so brightly that it blackened, then dissolved, its feathers raining like a fanfare over Russia. But the English accent says the bird's ashes birthed another, and another, and so on until an army of firebirds shone like assembled stars in the winter sky.

 _Be strong, little firebird. There's time yet for you to light up the world._

Natalia chokes, and for a lucid instant, her eyes are open, fixed upon the very blue gaze of the English woman. "I have no place in the world," she says, or thinks she says, before the world goes black like ashes again.

But she'll rise (she always does.)

 **~x~X~x~**

It is the 21st century, and Natasha Romanoff is a thousand different people, and none of them are herself.

It is the 21st century, and Peggy Carter is a collage of dreams and wars, hopes and loves, tangled together in a dance that never stops.

The nurses don't look at the redheaded visitor, but they see her in the corners of their eyes. They imagine her clad in leather, armed with guns, poised to draw them into her very detailed, very much public web of deception, and they maintain more than a safe distance (if there is such a thing.) The nurses only allow her to enter because when one of them, boldly or stupidly, calls the police, the police say, "We aren't authorized to touch her," which means, "She scares the breath out of us," and they won't be coming.

"Your hair is so red," says Peggy, absently fingering a strand of her long gray tresses. "You always were so _red_ , little firebird. You haven't changed at all."

And Natasha hasn't. Not really. She was too selfish to come here of her own free will. She was too soft to refuse when Steve looked at her with those baby blue eyes and said, pleading, "Natalia, I can't be there every day, and she's alone. She should never have been alone."

Peggy takes a deep breath, her eyes fluttering open and shut. "Where's Steve?"

His name makes Natasha's heart do a somersault behind her ribs, and she tells herself it's for any other reason but the truth. "He couldn't visit today. But he'll be back."

"For our dance?"

Natasha's breath hitches. "Yes," she lies. She's good at lying.

Peggy shakes her head. She knots her fingers together, as if in prayer. "No," she says softly. "No, little firebird. You love him."

"What?"

"You love him." Peggy stretches out a frail, pale, wrinkled hand, knotted with blue veins, but there's strength in it still, and it holds Natasha's fast. "I know. I did."

"Miss Carter –" The room is spinning, orbiting the place where their hands meet; two generations, dying and deathless, soldier and assassin, hero and weapon, American spirit and a Russian winter's cold.

"It's okay, little firebird," Peggy says, and squeezes her hand. "It's okay."

Natasha doesn't say anything. She wipes away a drop of something that's stranded on her cheek, that's certainly not a tear, that couldn't be. She closes her eyes. "You saved my life once. I'll never be able to repay that."

"But you will."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

Peggy's eyes are faraway, but more than intense. They are the oceans that swallowed Steve Rogers, then relinquished him as someone new. They are the sky above countless outdoor drills with the Red Room. They are promises to a girl Natasha fears she has never been, or will never be.

"Live, little firebird," Peggy says, "and it's payment… it's payment enough." And then she breaks into a coughing fit so fierce that the nurses really do enter the room, albeit warily, and Natasha leaves when one of them snaps a photo that will doubtlessly be posted to Twitter later. _Saw the S.H.I.E.L.D. assassin from the news. What was she doing here?_

Natasha doesn't really know. But as she steps outside, as the door clicks shut behind her, she looks at her hands, and they're shaking.

 _Live, little firebird._

She wants to try.

 **~x~X~x~**

 **A/N:** The title of this fic comes from a comic titled BLACK WIDOW: THE NAME OF THE ROSE, in which Natasha's inner monologue literally reads, "We burn in fire. We burn in blood. We burn in dreams. And it never ends."

Also, some exciting news: I have a Tumblr now, under the username NatashaFreakingRomanoff, so you're welcome to follow me there and say hello! :D


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